Golden (review)

Subtlety is not part of the social system at Lissy's high school in Oklahoma; you're either Golden or you're a Non, and not even Lissy's status as the new girl from California gives her enough cachet for entry into the top caste. Though her grandmother calls Lissy's ability to see auras a gift, and Lissy's little sister Lexie is dying for her own Sight to manifest itself, Lissy sees it as one more weirdness that contributes to her status as social pariah. As her Sight develops, though, she is able to see more than auras—she begins to see the connections between people, making a walk through the halls of her high school into a technicolored octopus of streaming and intertwining auras; she also sees nauseating, terrifying evil in the very hot math teacher that everyone thinks is such a great guy. The pace lags through overly repetitive descriptions of Lissy's visions, and the basis of the situation is a standard chick-lit drama. It's nice to see a touch of innovation on the new-girl-crashes-school-hierarchy plot, though; being able to see and even manipulate who's crushing on whom and who is really evil underneath their suave exteriors is a handy skill that most high-schoolers would covet. Barnes also makes some of her characters more ambiguous than one might expect, and the climax is B-horror-movie worthy. Shop this to readers who liked Lauren Myracle's Rhymes with Witches (BCCB 5/05) to add another dimension to their suspicions that there's something occult driving the high school social scene.